Tag: Prof. Sunny Awhefeada

Are These Soldiers Or Hooligans In Uniform?

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By Sunny Awhefeada     The title adopted for today’s piece is a slightly modified, if not imitative, version of how someone labeled a post on facebook two days ago. The post in question is a video in which a helpless civilian was being pummeled by soldiers in uniform under the watchful supervision of a major-general! The victim is neither a terrorist nor a bandit! He is just another civilian accused by power drunk soldiers of denting the jeep of the major-general. As the brutes in uniform rained blows on…

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A Tale of Two Videos By Sunny Awhefeada

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By Sunny Awhefeada   The title of this piece will tickle the memory of those familiar with the corpus of English Literature who must of necessity remember the title of Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Dickensian imagination was inspired or better put provoked by the kind of inveterate socio-economic malaise that is afflicting Nigeria at the moment. Dickens lived and wrote in an epoch of unimaginable social rot and grinding poverty. The social, economic and cultural milieu of the Victorian Age during which English fiction bloomed…

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Is Soweto Happening Here? By Sunny Awhefeada

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By Sunny Awhefeada     Part of the staple that formed and conditioned the consciousness of my generation was the monstrosity of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Before apartheid got dismantled in 1994, young people of my generation were active psychological participants in the events that led to the defeat of that inhumanly racist phenomenon. Our history books, literary texts, newspapers, films and other media brought apartheid and anti-apartheid engagements to us so regularly to the extent that the events, the names of persons involved and the places where…

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For The Good Of Our Future By Sunny Awhefeada

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By Sunny Awhefeada,   I have in the last sixteen years been a willing pupil, or better put student, to my children, their friends, playmates and schoolmates. The experience has been a big learning curve that has been more rewarding than all the formal education I have acquired. Bringing up children is beyond being an act. It is also an art which mutates as there is no exact formula, but nuances which are determined by situations. Parents, most if not all, look forward to moments of great expectations and bliss…

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They Have Given Up On Us By Sunny Awhefeada

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By Sunny Awhefeada Elementary social studies taught us that the essence of government was the welfare and security of the people. Government is that entity to whom the people surrender their freedom in exchange for protection. Before Western political thought birthed social contract as a concept, Africans if not people everywhere, had lived in organized societies and their lives were regulated, functional and fulfilled. People everywhere had their lore and mores before the imperial intrusion. The presence of an African civilization thousands of years ago attests to the socio-economic cum…

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The Coming of Day-By Sunny Awhefeada

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By Sunny Awhefeada,   The Ghanaian Yao Egblewogbe’s poem “The Coming of Day” speaks to the African predicament with a remarkable sense of irony. The imagery of day signifies hope and relief from the horrors of the night and colonialism was night in the configuration of the African experience. Those who led the anti-colonial struggle promised the people dawn and day. Egblewogbe’s country’s leading nationalist, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, told Africans to “seek ye first the political kingdom and every other thing will be added onto you”. In the course of…

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Hard Times By Sunny Awhefeada

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By Sunny Awhefeada,   Hard Times, published in 1854, is the title of the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, the English novelist. Like most of Dickens’ novels, Hard Times is a searing indictment of a corrosive and morally atrophied society on the brink of disaster. Set in Victorian England, which was touted as a prosperous epoch, the novel reframes the socio-economic turmoil that undermined the entire fabric of the English society of that time. The reality of what was configured as prosperity was acute deprivation and hunger for the common…

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Make Dis Government Kill Us Make Everybodi Rest

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By Sunny Awhefeada,   It has become trite to reiterate that the primary objective of government is the security and welfare of the people. This cliché which is taken for granted all over the world appears to be alien to the Nigerian context even though it is enshrined in our constitution. Since we observe every regulation in the breach and go against the grain in all that we do, government has become the people’s most inveterate antagonist in Nigeria. The people have come to see government as an adversary and…

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Analysis: A Bumpy Ride And Half A Loaf

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By Sunny Awhefeada,   Part of what conditioned our growing up years, in my part of the world, was street wisdom obtained by association with our age mates and those older. A significant aspect of street lore was the apt use of language to describe phenomena and evade or ameliorate problems and sanctions. We picked up words and expressions which enriched our minds on a daily basis. Some of them were wholesome while others were anchored on mischief and meant only for our ears and not that of those older…

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Samson Edema And The Quest For A “New Dawn

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By Sunny Awhefeada The literature curriculum that my generation of undergraduates was taught at the University of Benin, it was the same in other Nigerian universities then, was a hybrid of English and African oeuvres. There were occasional attempts at studying European Literatures in Translation, but the bulk of what we studied was English and African Literatures. One of the courses that left a lasting impact in our impressionable minds was “Twentieth Century British Literature” which in some other curricular was dubbed “Modernist Literature” or “Modern Literature”. The course, never…

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